In another of his pastorals a shepherd utters a Dirge not much inferior to the former, in the following lines, Ah me the while! ah me, the luckless day! How he still charms the ear with these artful repetitions of the epithets; and how significant is the last verse! I defy the most common reader to repeat them without feeling some motions of compassion. In the next place I shall rank his Proverbs, in which I formerly observed he excels: For example, A rolling stone is ever bare of moss; Lastly his elegant dialect, which alone might prove him the eldest born of Spenser, and our only true Arcadian, I should think it proper for the several writers of pastoral, to confine themselves to their several counties: Spenser seems to have been of this opinion; for he hath laid the scene of one of his pastorals in Wales, where, with all the simplicity natural to that part of our island, one shepherd bids the other Goodmorrow in an unusual and elegant manner. Diggon Davy, I bid hur God-day: Or Diggon hur is, or I mis-say. Diggon answers, Hur was hur while it was day-light; But the most beautiful example of this kind that I ever met with, is a very valuable piece which I chanced to find among some old manuscripts, entitled, " A Pastoral Ballad;" which I think, for its nature and simplicity, may (notwithstanding the modesty of the title) be allowed a perfect pastoral: It is composed in the Somersetshire dialect, and the names such as are proper to the country people. It may be observed, as a farther beauty of this pastoral, the words Nymph, Dryad, Naiad, Fawn, Cupid, or Satyr, are not once mentioned through the whole. I shall make no apology for inserting some few lines of this excellent piece. Cicily breaks thus into the subject, as she is going a milking; Cicily. Rager go vetch tha 1 kee, or else tha zun Roger. Thou shouldst not ax ma tweece, but I've a be It is to be observed, that this whole dialogue is formed upon the passion of jealousy; and his mentioning the parson's kine naturally revives the jealousy of the shepherdess Cicily, which she expresses as follows: Cicily. Ah Rager, Rager, chez was zore avraid Roger. Cicily thou charg'st me false I'll zwear to thee, In which answer of his are express'd at once that "Spirit of Religion," and that "Innocence of the Golden Age," so necessary to be observed by all writers of pastoral. At the conclusion of this piece, the author reconciles the lovers, and ends the eclogue the most simply in the world. So Rager parted vor to vetch tha kee, 1 That is the kine or cows. I am loth to shew my fondness for antiquity so far as to prefer this ancient British author to our present English writers of pastoral; but I cannot avoid making this obvious remark, that both Spenser and Philips have hit into the same road with this old West Country Bard of ours. After all that hath been said, I hope none can think it any injustice to Mr. Pope, that I forebore to mention him as a pastoral writer; since upon the whole he is of the same class with Moschus and Bion, whom we have excluded that rank; and of whose eclogues, as well as some of Virgil's, it may be said, that according to the description we have given of this sort of Poetry, they are by no means Pastorals, but "something better." Steele's Guardian appeared for the last time on the 1st of October, 1713, when danger of a reaction towards absolutism, which was by no means imaginary, pressed so much upon Steele's mind that he gave himself entirely to the momentous questions of the day. On the 6th of October he began The Englishman, which lasted until the 15th of February, 1714. In that month he entered Parliament as member for Stockbridge, in Dorset, and published a pamphlet called "The Crisis," which endeavoured to defend the settlement of the Crown by the Revolution. He did this, not by attack upon those who would be glad to see the Stuarts back, but by a very clear and temperate setting forth of what was gained by the Revolution, with recital at large of the Acts of Settlement of the respective Crowns of England and Scotland, and of the Act of the 12th and 13th years of William III. "for the further Limitation of the Crown, and better securing the Rights and Liberties of the Subjects," of other Acts bearing on the settlement of the English Crown, and of the articles of the Act for a union of the two kingdoms of England and Scotland, which received Royal Assent in the fifth year of the reign of Anne. This pamphlet was suggested by a lawyer, who supplied its materials. It was submitted before publication to Addison and to Whig statesmen for revision, pains being taken to make it simply a full and exact statement of facts to the people who might be misled through ignorance. But party-spirit then was passionate. There was a Tory majority in the House of Commons, and for the writing of "The Crisis" it expelled Steele from the House on the 18th of March, 1714, by a majority of 245 to 152. It is difficult to say how far reaction might have gone if there had been no men bold as Steele to challenge it, or to what issue dealings with the Pretender might ultimately have been brought had there been time for those who sought it to work on towards the re-establishment of Stuart rule. the Queen died somewhat suddenly on the 1st of August, 1714. But His interest in a struggle on which so much of the future of England seemed to depend did not prevent Steele from issuing in this year a "Ladies' Library," designed to aid in deepening the characters of women and lifting them out of the frivolity that came of their misdirected or neglected education. In Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian, he had sought, and Addison had joined in his endeavour, to discredit fashionable affectations among men that had come down out of the days of Charles II., and were inconsistent with our English reverence for home. The steady genial labour in aid of the establishment of woman as man's equal companion in life, the playful kindliness of satire that discouraged vanities and follies, and the noble believed from their general and undistinguished aspersions that many of these men had any such relations as mothers, wives or sisters; one of them makes a lover say in a tragedy, Thou art woman, a true copy of the first, He too, an angel, till he durst rebel, And you are, sure, the stars that with him fell. And always ready when you would deceive. FRONTIS PIECE TO THE FIRST VOLUME OF STEELE'S "LADIES' LIBRARY (1714. warmth of his appreciation of the dignity and beauty of true womanhood and of its guiding strength in a true home, went side by side in Steele with a fearless patriotism. This is his INTRODUCTION TO THE LADIES' LIBRARY. Being by nature more inclined to such enquiries as by general custom my sex is debarr'd from. I could not resist a strong propensity to reading: and having fisttered myself that what I read dwelt with improvement upon my mind, I could not but conclude that a due regard being had to different circumstances of life, it is a great injustice to shut books of knowledge from the eyes of women. Masing one day in this tract of thought. I turned over some books of Fork and Fish, written by the most peate writers of the age, and began to consider whit avvent they gave of our composure, diffrent from that of the other sex. But indeed, when I dipped into those writings, were it possible to conceive otherwise, I could not have 1 i Ah traitress! Ah ingrate; Ah faithless mind! DRYDEN'S "Aurengzebe" I shall conclude poetical testimonies to our disadvantage with one quotation more, Intolerable vanity! Your sex Was never in the right: you're always false. OTWAY'S "Orphan." It may be said for these writings, that there is something perhaps in the character of those that speak, which woul circumstantiate the thing so as not to make it a repres à upon women as such. But to this it may be easily and justly answer'd, that if the author had right sentiments of woman in general, he might more emphatically aggravat an ill character, by comparison of an ill to an innocent and virtuous one, than by general calumnies without exception. But I leave authors, who are so mean as to desire to please by falling in with corrupt imaginations, rather thr affect a just the less extensive esteem by labouring : rectifie our affections by reason of which number are th greater part of those who have succeeded in poetry, either in verse or prose on the stage. When I apply myself to my French reading, I fin. women are still worse in proportion to the greater warm of the climate: and according to the descriptions of us the wits of that nation, tho they write in cool thought. in prose, by way of plain opinion, we are made up of afiata tion, coqucttry, falsehood, disguise, treachery, wantonnes, and perfidiousness. All our merit is to be less guilty one than another under one of these heads. Dissertations for the conduct of life are as gravely composed upon these topics, as if they were as infallible as mathematical truths. It cost me a great deal of pains to study by what means I should refute such scandalous intimations against my very nature. But the more I reflected upon those abuses, I grew the less concerned to answer them, and finally resolved upon this. They are perhaps in the right who speak this of mere women; and it is the business of ingenious debauch'd men, who regard us only as such, to give us those ideas of ourselves, that we may become their more easy prey. I believed it therefore the safest and surest method of gainsaying such light accounts of our sex to think them a truth, till I had arrived by the perusal of more solid authors, to a constancy of mind and settled opinion of persons and things, which should place me above being pleased or dissatisfied with praise or dispraise, upon account of beauty or deformity, or any other advantages or disadvantages, but what flowed from the habits and dispositions of my soul. I resolve therefore to confine my little studies, which are to lead to the conduct of my life, to the writings of the most eminent of our divines, and from thence, as I have heard young students do in the study of a science, make for my own private use a common place, that may direct me in all the relations of life, that do now, or possibly may, concern have others do to us, if we were in their case and circumstances and they in ours. You that are parents, and have to deal with the world, ought to be just and equal in all your dealings; in the first place, for the sake of your own souls, and next for the sake of your children. Not only that you may entail no curse upon the estate you leave them, but likewise that you may teach them no injustice by the example you set before them, which in this particular they will be as apt to imitate as in any one thing, because of the present worldly advantages which it seems to bring, and because justice is in truth a manly virtue, and least understood by children. Wherefore, injustice is a vice which they will soonest practise, and with the least reluctancy, because they have least knowledge of it in many particular cases, and because also they have so little sense of the great virtue of honesty. They should not be allowed to cheat, no, not in play and sport, even when they play for little or nothing; for if they practise it in that case, and be unjust in a little, they will be much more tempted to be so when they can gain a great deal by it. Xenophon, in his Institution of Cyrus, which he designed for the idea of a well-educated prince, tells us this little but very instructive story concerning young Cyrus; that his governor, the better to make him understand the nature of justice, put this case to him :- "You see there," said he to Cyrus, "two boys playing, of different stature; the lesser of them has a very long coat, and the taller a very short one. Now, if you were a judge, how would you dispose of these two garments?" Cyrus immediately, and with very good reason, as he thought, passes this sudden sentence: "The taller boy should have the longer garment, and he that was of the lower stature the shorter," because this certainly was fittest for them both. Upon which his governor rebukes him to this purpose, telling him that if he were to make two coats for them he said well; but he did not put this case to him as a tailor, but as a judge, and as such he had given a very wrong sentence, for a judge ought not to consider what is most fit, but what is just; not who could make best use of a thing, but who has the most right to it. By these familiar ways may the principles of virtue be instilled into children, and there is nothing wherein they may be more easily misled than in justice, in matter of right and wrong. They should therefore be taught the general rules of both, because if we would teach them to do justice, and to avoid doing injustice, we must teach them to know what is justice and what injustice; for many are unjust merely out of ignorance, and for want of knowing better, and cannot help it. Ornament from the First Edition of "The Beggar's Opera." CHAPTER VIII. UNDER GEORGE I. AND GEORGE II.-A.D. 1714 TO A.D. 1760. the friends. It did not prevent their friendly greetings of each other, but Addison was then within a few months of his death. He died on the 17th of June, 1719, aged forty-seven, and after his death Steele missed no opportunity of paying open love and honour to his memory. In the following year the Lord Chamberlain punished Steele for opposing the Peerage Bill (which was thrown out) by depriving him of his patent as Governor of Drury Lane. The sudden fine of £700 a year caused money embarrassments. Sir Robert Walpole, who had gone out of office in 1717, returned to power in April, 1721, and in May of that year Steele was restored to his office in the theatre and its emoluments. In 1722 he produced his fourth play, "The Conscious Lovers." In 1723 he began two other comedies, but his health failing, he went to Bath, and thence to Wales. Soon afterwards he withdrew wholly to Wales, and lived near Carmarthen in a pleasant house---now a farmhouseupon a height overlooking the vale of the Towy. There he died on the 1st of September, 1729, aged fifty-eight. "I was told," wrote Mr. Victor, "he retained his cheerful sweetness of temper to the last, and would often be carried out of a summer's evening, when the country lads and lasses were assembled at their rural sports, and with his pencil give an order on his agent, the mercer, for a new gown to the best dancer." Two daughters survived Steele. He had lost a son Richard in 1716, and a son Eugene in 1723; his youngest child, his daughter Mary, died of consumption in the year after her father's death. There remained the eldest of Steele's children, his daughter Elizabeth, who married the Hon. John Trevor, a Welsh judge, afterwards the third Lord Trevor. ADDISON, at the beginning of the reign of George I., | brought a very light cloud over the relation between was Chief Secretary in Ireland under the Earl of Sunderland. Steele entered Parliament again as member for Boroughbridge, was made Deputy Lieutenant for Middlesex, and knighted upon bringing up an address. At the request of the players, to whom he had always been a friend, he replaced William Collier, Tory M.P. for Truro, as Governor of Drury Lane, and one of the first uses he made of his influence in the theatre was to produce his friend Addison's comedy of "The Drummer." In 1715 there was the Rebellion in the North, and Addison, at the request of the Whig Government, now in power, wrote a series of essays under the name of "The Freeholder," which appeared on Mondays and Fridays from December 23rd, 1715, to June 29th, 1716, to persuade men to accept the monarchy as settled by the Revolution. The Earl of Sunderland resigned, in August, 1716, his office of Lord Lieutenant, and Addison, no longer Chief Secretary in Ireland, married in the same month Charlotte, Countess Dowager of Warwick, and began to live at Holland House. In April, 1717, the Earl of Sunderland became Secretary of State, with Addison, aged fortyfive, for colleague. He was then suffering from asthma and dropsy. Steele was in the same year lame with gout. After the failure of the Rebellion of 1715, Steele had pleaded for mercy to the condemned lords, and presented a petition. He was made one of the Commissioners of forfeited estates, which excluded other official employment. At this time he owed no more than the pay due to him would clear. In December, 1718, Steele's wife died, aged forty, leaving a son and two daughters. Addison's failing health caused him in that year to resign office, but he was interested in a Peerage Bill which his government had introduced to restrain the power of the Crown in creation of new peers. The bill, designed to prevent a corrupt use of power by creating new peers to secure a vote, as had been once done by advice of Robert Harley in the preceding reign, would have transformed our peerage into a caste, feebly instead of vigorously recruited by drawing into its ranks the representatives of wealth, wisdom, or genius among the people. Steele saw the mistake, and opposed the bill in a series of four papers, connected together by the title of "The Plebeian," of which the first number appeared on the 14th of March, 1719. Addison replied to it on the 19th with "The Old Whig." This division of opinion Jonathan Swift's mother died in 1710, when he was in his forty-third year, and he wrote in his notebook, "I have now lost my barrier between me and death. God grant I may live to be as well prepared for it as I confidently believe her to have been. If the way to heaven be through piety, truth, justice, and charity, she is there." In September of that year Swift was lodging in Bury Street, next door to Mrs. Van Homrigh. Bartholomew Van Homrigh was a Dutch merchant of Amsterdam who went to Dublin at the Revolution, and was appointed by 1 See in this Library "English Plays," pages 412-415. William III. Commissioner of the Revenue. He | sentiment that even to this day finds currency. married an Irishwoman of low birth, and left at his death, in 1703, about £16,000 in equal division to his wife, his two sons, and his two daughters, Esther and Mary. The family was sickly. The sons went abroad. The elder died beyond sea, and the younger died soon after. The widow and two daughters spent money in London till the widow died; in London Swift became acquainted with them, and undertook to play tutor to Esther, whose education had been neglected, who, says Lord Orrery, was "far from being either beautiful or genteel," and who was certainly obtrusive. She fell in love with Swift, and told him she had done so. This was at the end of Queen Anne's reign. Swift was made, in 1713, Dean of St. Patrick's, and he wrote for Miss Van Homrigh a poem on her declaration to him, his title of Dean, Decanus, twisted round into Cadenus Cadenus and Vanessa-in which he expressed his surprise and pointed out her error, but made his bitter pill so small and covered it with so much sugar that she took the dose for a sugar-plum. Swift went to his Deanery in Dublin after the change of reign which placed the Whigs again in power, and did his duty by the Church. There is reason to think that in 1716 he was married privately to Esther Johnson (Stella) in the Deanery garden. If so, it was at her wish for the private satisfaction of her mind. If he had not felt that he must forego marrying as others marry, while he yet desired to join himself in daily converse of mind to the woman whom he wholly loved, he would have married Esther Johnson years before. But there was that within which made Swift, in later life, keep his birthdays by reading to himself the third chapter of Job, which begins, "After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day. And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish in which I was born." The attacks of giddiness and deafness could not be continuously misinterpreted, nor the shadow of the coming end in many a mood of inner consciousness. He would not transmit the curse to a child, yet the star of his life was indeed Esther Johnson. In 1717 Esther and Mary Van Homrigh, after their mother's death, came to live about ten miles from Dublin, in a house they had, Marley Abbey, near Cellbridge. Swift did not visit them. But in 1720, in which year Swift published proposals for the universal use of Irish linen manufactures by the Irish people, Mary Van Homrigh became dangerously ill. Then Swift, in simple kindness, called on the sisters. Mary died, and Swift did not withdraw himself from Vanessa, but again unwisely humoured her, the last survivor of a sickly house, herself not marked for a long life, until she presumed so far as to write to Esther Johnson and ask what were her relations with the Dean. When this was sent on to Swift, he rode in anger to Marley Abbey, placed the letter upon the table before Miss Van Homrigh, left her without a word, and never saw her again. That was in 1720. Miss Van Homrigh died in 1723, and left evidence of the diseased state of her mind by requiring that "Cadenus and Vanessa," with Swift's letters to her, should be published. The scandal-loving public proceeded to the manufacture of a large stock of false Stella left Dublin for a time to escape from it, but when somebody said to her that the Dean must have cared for Miss Van Homrigh very much to write so beautifully as he did in "Cadenus and Vanessa," she replied, "It is very well known that the Dean can write beautifully on a broomstick." It was in the year after Miss Van Homrigh's death that Swift won immense popularity in Ireland by an attack upon the copper coinage that the English Government was then introducing. Coins of small value had become so scarce in Ireland that it was often difficult to give change to a customer. The Government ordered a supply of copper money, and gave to Mr. Wood, an ironmaster at Wolverhampton, the contract for making it. When the outcry was led by Swift against the coins thus introduced, Sir Isaac Newton was the Master of the Mint. He was asked to examine the new coinage, and certified that in intrinsic value it was rather better than that current in England. Swift's letters against it, signed M. B. Drapier, because in the character of Drapier he had recommended the use of Irish linen by the Irish, are amusing for their ingenious but quite honest extravagance. This is the first of them. A LETTER TO THE Shopkeepers, Tradesmen, Farmers, and Common People OF IRELAND, CONCERNING THE BRASS-HALF-PENCE Coined by one WILLIAM WOOD, Hard-ware-Man, With a DESIGN to have them pass in this KINGDOM. Wherein is Shewn The Power of his PATENT, the Value of his HALFPENCE, and how far every Person may be obliged to take the same in Payments, and how to behave himself in Case such an Attempt should be made by WOOD, or any other Person. (Very proper to be kept in every Family.) By M. B. DRAPIER. LETTER I. To the Tradesmen, Shopkeepers, Farmers, and Country People in |